Oliver

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Again, I’m probably the last person who should attempt to answer this question. Viewers will decide what they like best. But I do hope the most attractive point of the film is what I wrote above: that it does not judge Oliver for this reliance on chatbots. Instead, it simply lets him tell his story. And what did I personally find attractive about his story? The fact that he himself was still ambivalent about the technology, questioning whether or not his heavy usage was a positive or negative influence on his life. He used ChatGPT to help with his social anxiety, for example, but when it told him to go out and meet more people, he admitted he was having trouble implementing the advice. He seems relatively self-aware that these artificial relationships are not ultimately what he needs—he definitely does not suffer from what some have called “AI psychosis”—and yet he still turns back to it day after day. I often feel the same ambivalence toward my smart phone. I know the ways in which it negatively affects my well-being, and yet I feel stuck in a pattern of constant interaction with it. Oliver is neither an evangelist nor a madman. He is a human being. He is struggling and he is honest about those struggles. That honesty, that intimacy, and that sincerity he brings to the project is what's most attractive to me.